Hi,
The problem comes when I try to add my little ARM based linux box onto the group. Again same sources used (latest stable from the wiki), crosscompiles fine and I can load the module as normal on the box. Setup goes as it should on both the device and the laptop, and both systems seems to be running smoothly. But my laptop can only see the other laptop, and the device doesn't see anyone. The wireless net is working and I can ping each device directly if I assign IP's to the 'real' interfaces, but through bat0 nothing is found. Any idea what is going wrong?
as soon as normal pings work batman-adv should also work. From what you describe I can't see any obvious mistake. Did you try to peek into the debug logs or capture some packets to see whether the nodes are communicating correctly ?
I've also played with the batman daemon on the device, with it I the laptop and device can see each other just fine. The problem there is that apparently it doesn't really support multicast forwarding? i.e. If I have 3 devices A-B-C, where A does not have direct link to C (batman routes through B), sending a multicast from A can be received in B and vice versa, also same for C-B, but no messages from A to C. Will I have the same problem with batman-adv? Or can this be fixed on the daemon?
The daemon operates on layer 3, therefore multicast forwarding can't work.
Some other layer 3 routing daemons try to support multicast by hacking a layer 2 tunneling into the daemon. The performance is poor at the expense of CPU load but give it a try yourself in case this is no problem.
However, batman-adv supports multicast out of the box.
Regards, Marek